Thursday, May 11, 2006

Since our previous installment here, I decided I couldn't keep imposing on my friend So-, so I moved out of her apartment and back into my new apartment (after having the locks changed anew). Meanwhile, the new boyfriend E- had to go back the U.S., leaving the protagonist to her own devices...

Friday, Jan. 8, 1999

At some point on Friday evening I voluntarily let St- into my apartment. This memory is rather vague because it's hard for me to imagine what would possess me to do such a thing, but if I recall correctly he must have found me on my way home from work and promised convincingly that all of these unpleasant things such as break-ins were in the past and that he would stop by briefly and leave peacefully.

At the outer wall he made a big show of demonstrating that he knew the code to get into my complex. He said that the time I had brought him to see the apartment (before we had broken up), I had typed in the code without telling it to him, and that that had upset him. He therefore wanted to make it clear to me how "stupid" it was of me to try to keep the code from him since he obviously could easily find out what it was (undoubtedly by looking over the shoulder of someone who was entering the building) and hence could enter my building anytime he wanted.

Inside the apartment I mentioned to him that there was no water flowing to the bathroom, and he responded by turning some knob on a pipe that I hadn't noticed protruding from the wall in my bedroom. (The apartment was in very poor condition, so a protruding pipe here and there hardly stood out.)

My immediate reaction was to be amazed at how foolish I was not to look for pipes leading in and out of the bathroom to trace the problem. Upon later reflection, I became very angry from the realization that the only way that the water could possibly have gotten turned off in the first place was that St- had done it himself when he had broken in, just to cause problems for me in my new apartment. (The water was certainly running before -- I had tested the sink, toilet, and shower on several occasions.)

When it came time for St- to leave, he of course put up a fight, and I essentially had to physically throw him out.